Schopen is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and also does much work in Austin, Texas. Both places are lucky to have him. He's a major scholar because he masters the smallest details of his sources, then stands back and imagines the big picture. By asking good questions he comes up with interesting answers. The sunny serenity that characterizes Schopen's work shouldn't disguise his originality. He's described by his peers as having revolutionized the study of Indian Buddhism, and although it isn't possible for a general reviewer to confirm this, his standing is clearly very high.
There's a welcome touch of an older school of academic about him as well, something of the now legendary JRR Tolkien when he was professor of nordic philology at Oxford, and of other scholars turned imaginative writers such as Robert Graves. Maybe Schopen, too, will take to writing fiction one day -- he clearly reads such books as he comments that the traditional view of the Buddhist monk quoted above has "found its way even into modern European novels."
But it's his urbanity and wit that stay with you. You can easily imagine his colleagues doubling up with laughter as the celebrated scholar once again knocks over the academic proprieties -- at the moment, for instance, when he breezily ends the final chapter, originally published as an article in a learned journal, as follows [Professor Bechert is a rival expert in the field]: "Again, our text suggests that for the Indian Mulasarvastivadin tradition the writing down of Buddhist texts was simply not -- unlike Professor Bechert's sixty-fifth birthday -- a major event. We send our congratulations!"
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